This vibes anecdotally with my local chapter. In the face of overwhelming membership solidarity with Palestinian liberation, the social imperialist reactionaries are purging themselves.
I quit DSA because it wasn’t Leftist enough.
You quit DSA because it wasn’t Zionist enough.
We are not the same.
Maybe it’s worth checking out again now
It sounds like it’s moving left, though it also sounds like this has only been possible due to a mass drop in membership following the failure of the Bernie campaigns. Marxist Unity Group seems like their worth checking out as an internal bloc to the DSA and where it could go
Funnily enough, the 3 he listed (Red Star, MUG, and Commie Caucus) are the 3 I’d most recommend people check out. Unless you have a strong preference for one of them I’d just join whichever is most active in your area.
I think the big difference is that Commie Caucus leans direct actionist while MUG leans more electoral.
Whatever the cause, it is opportunity to radicalized many people and take advantage of a local organizing apparatus (where applicable) to do good work for the community.
They have had a drop, but they’re still massively above their 2015 numbers. This is just a natural lull where the opportunists and the less committed falll away.
Keep a foot in the door so you can jump in opportunistically. Unless you would die from embarrassment lol.
the horrific Hamas October 7 anti-Jewish pogrom
That is a wild way to frame an attack from within a ghetto against the nation that starves them in a ghetto
Its the same way we’d phrase a prison break here in the US.
The prisoners used violence against the guards, which is an unacceptable reversal of roles. The inmates that broke out have condemned everyone in the jail, since anyone might have shown them aid or even sympathy. The inmates are presumed dangerous, presumed deserving of punishment, and presumed less than human. Hell, its not far off from the way we described New Orleans residents fleeing Hurricane Katrina. Or Haitians escaping their own island prison.
What we’re witnessing in Palestine isn’t far from what American politicians want to implement at home. That’s what is so fucking chilling about all this. Palestine is our future.
GOOD post
Any time I read “Hamas pogrom” I mentally check out. Meaningless word salad. Pogroms cannot be effected by the people who are being subjugated
Warsaw Uprising? You mean the horrific Home Army August 1 anti-German pogrom?
Yeah, if Hamas took pains to avoid hurting non-Jewish whites or something like that, then there might be a real question of antisemitism. Or if they, like, greased their bullets with shellfish (halal but not kosher) or literally screamed “death to Jews” or . . . Basically anything inconsistent with simply lashing out in violence against the colonizer population, which is not what a pogrom is.
Pogroms are enacted by powerful groups against disenfranchised, oppressed and weak groups. It’s literally impossible for Palestinians to pogrom Israelis, they simply don’t have the means
I disagree with that. In the same way that a revolutionary party is functionally a state, if Hamas took over even one city block in Israel for a few hours and said “kill all the Jews, release the rest”, they are the dominant power in that time and place and are thereby not part of your logic.
But that is not what they did, so it is a moot point.
Hamas took over and destroyed settlements, because those settlements are illegal and belong to colonizers. They killed the people living there. It wasn’t kill all jews, it was kill all occupying settlers. It’s not a pogrom because they are being colonized and are defending themselves.
You’ll notice I said “but they didn’t do that”. They were not targeting Jews, they killed and took hostages from among the settler population indiscriminately. That is what made it not a pogrom, not their colonized status.
It’s more aptly described as a militarized prison break and sabotage mission
If we stared calling Gaza a Bantustan maybe they’d get the point.
I’ve tried. It bounces off them
Yeah, I think a lot of Anglos think South Africa was like segregation in the south, when it was a totally different thing which I want to say was worse but obviously segregation was and arguably still is a horrific hellscape and a permanent blight on humanity.
But they remained united in one overarching shared aim—to take a well-meaning, not particularly well-organized, and essentially social democratic organization still committed in practice to the original DSA vision of creating “the left wing of the possible,” and reinvent it as the mass vanguard party of the proletariat that somehow they had never been able to pull off while operating under their own banners of deepest red.
Founding member of popular socialist group doesn’t know definition of socialist.
Yup, that’s America.
“You made my book club political!”
Generous of you to assume this lib reads (Harry Potter doesn’t count)
No one actually reads in bookclubs, they just gossip
Amazing how this just hits pretty much every radlib talking point.
- “we need to work with the Democratic party”
- “the left wing of the possible” aka “pragmatism”
- “Marxists are evil dictators”
- Zionists
- “Israel has a right to defend itself”
- “Israel has a right to exist”
- “RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA, we have to support the Nazis in Ukraine!”
- Uyghur “genocide”
- “purity tests”
- believing the IOF’s claims of Hamas’s actions
Also, you don’t have to read the article now, I just summed it up. Unless you really want to read about the radlib history of the DSA.
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Eat shit Zionist dog.
This should be in c/the_dunk_tank. Entryism is when people join my org. Imagine the DSA being too radical for you
Lol yeah the whole entryism framing is so silly. Like the author says it’s a bad thing when his party gains new members unless they completely agree with some old socdems?
I mean, we were saying shit like “regroup in DSA and radicalize libs” like, we were entryists lol. Let’s not rewrite history
Some old socdems who also point out that they achieved nothing for over two decades.
ctrl+f “workers”, “working class”, “proletariat” NOT FOUND
old-fashioned Marxist-Leninist
You know who else believed that struggling with the contradictions of class society is “outdated” and not “modern”? The nazis
They did say proletariat or some version, but only to sneer at MLs
DSA’s National Political Committee did not agree with the two most prominent democratic socialists in American public life.
doesn’t really seem like a huge dunk on the DSA tbh
knowing Israel@will retaliate- do you get that they don’t give a FUCK about Palestinian lives???
damn silverman, what if the israeli military simply… didn’t retaliate? is it really solely on the prisoners inside the concentration camp to break the cycle of violence, even as that violent cycle is being continuously engineered by the guards?
Also, in any socialist organization worth its salt the direction should be coming from the ground up, not the organization acquiescing to a couple of high-profile nominally socialist figures.
nominally
That’s a word carrying a huge load for those liberals, if you’re talking about who I think you’re talking about
If words were materials we could build a space elevator with this shit. Would make a lot of bazinga brains happy
The DSA has constitutional measures to undercut structures of democratic centralism, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the liberal administrators want to be able to steer it as they please.
woah, you’re starting to sound like an Authoritarian Democratic Centralist
I started reading thinking this was someone that’s pro-Palestine upset about DSA being too pro-Israel. Pleasant surprise to see that it is instead just a succ-dem purging themself.
DSA is getting better? Weeks where decades are happening?
They’re likely trying to not alienate their POC members and become a caricature of the Democratic Party Lite for White Guys
Same…I was reading this expecting something quite different
Anti-zionism seems to be the easiest fucking way to purge these losers.
If you’re sus about any wreckers or feds or neolibs in your org, ask whether they denounce israel and zionism. It will quickly out any of them.
40 years and fuck-all to show for it, but the moment any energy comes into the org from the outside and you leave? Good riddance
Oh fuck, have to remember this emote.
Of course you deployed it in the perfect thread
Hot take: DSA national’s statement is good because it condemns the killing of all civilians and still gets these people to show their asses. Seems like it may come in handy later.
DSA, meanwhile, thrived between 2016 and 2020—because it proved it could win victories in the here-and-now, give-and-take world of electoral politics
This sucks. Now don’t get me wrong, DSA has been able to get on some city councils and do some good work. But their main victory, the representatives belonging to “the squad” have all capitulated to Democrats and are at this point no different than standard liberals. Ilhan Omar did call Eliot Abrams evil to his face so that was kinda cool though
“That was not a question” when he tried to respond, just an incredible moment
and then she goes on to condemn Venezuela
given all of the damning evidence against Elliot Abrams I actually don’t think her line of questioning was that great.
Holy shit do you have a video?
C-SPAN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InGCmxCjaWE
chapo clip where they talk about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcyRaaxmz70
But their main victory, the representatives belonging to “the squad” have all capitulated to Democrats and are at this point no different than standard liberals.
In reality, DSA doesn’t have any national electeds.
Ilhan Omar did call Eliot Abrams evil to his face so that was kinda cool though
Unfortunately, she’s not part of DSA
There were many eloquent responses to DSA’s all-but-explicit endorsement of Hamas’s horrifying atrocities… But the one I’d like to highlight is from comedian, writer, and actor Sarah Silverman
Of course you would. What a fucking dork
Where better for a political organisation’s founder to get their takes on a historically muddied issue than a dipshit ex-standup who does blackface, has demonstrated they nothing about the actual situation, and has called for genocide?
But the one I’d like to highlight is from comedian, writer, and actor Sarah Silverman, posted on her Instagram account on October 8, after reading the National Political Committee’s initial response to the events of the previous day:
The DSA of which I was a proud lifetime member, has lost me forever…
Hold the fucking phone. Since fucking when was Sarah Silverman in the DSA?
She was probably part of the 2016 membership drive during the Sanders campaign. She was a vocal Sanders supporter for a while so I could believe it. A bunch of celebrities are in the DSA. I know Tim Heidecker is a member too. So is Adam McKay, the guy who wrote Anchorman.
She said “lifelong” as though like she was a member before. Wikipedia says “several years”.
PS til she’s older than the DSA.
I just remember her at the democratic national convention telling bernie bros to be quiet and back hillary or joe. (which ever year it was)
I misunderstood who was the lifelong member. The writer of the article claims to have joined the DSA during its founding, not Sarah Silverman.
Yeah the author claims to have joined during the found but Silverman also said.
The DSA of which I was a proud lifetime member.
She must have been exaggerating.
